Her abdomen full of blood that will nourish her eggs, a female Anopheles mosquito takes to the air. Her next landing may be a dangerous one—for the human who receives her bite. The female Anopheles mosquito is the only insect capable of carrying the human malaria parasite. When she jabs her proboscis into a person's epidermis to drink blood, she sprays the bite area with saliva that serves as an anticoagulant. If her last victim had malaria, that saliva will contain one-celled malaria parasites called plasmodia, a couple of dozen of which can enter the human bloodstream. But it only takes one to kill a person. When her minutes-long feeding is over, she will have spread the deadly menace to yet another victim.
Photograph by Hugh Sturrock
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